Friday, October 28, 2011

Unruly Does Not Mean Without Legal Basis

Having been pondering the state of things a lot lately there is a continuing disconnect between corporate media and the reality of the "boots on the ground". A demonstration is a legal right that we all have. When the Tea Party was "organized" they had media support because they were co-opted by the Koch brother type of money and the echo chamber from the Right. It was a Right wing based movement that had no roots, or at least a very small set of roots capitalizing on the irritation of people against government. I understand the irritation but, going back to Ronald Reagan, that has been the drum beat of the Right. It has a basic misunderstanding of what and where government resides. Government is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, making roads, educating our young and so forth... it is US.

The idea flows with a twist on what a "free" market looks like. The Right's current echo/voice says that a free market is supposed to be a completely unregulated marketplace. This is the market of the sociopath. Having a market without rules is to have the "right" to steal as much as to have a "right" to make a profit. That last was a line I heard as a sound bite from a media representative of Bank of America. That translates (for the Right) as they have a guaranty of profit regardless of how they treat people. That definition is wrong from the get-go. That definition is to ignore what makes a business grow. It is how the Right now defines the marketplace however. Regulations (rules) to any game are meant to make a fair, balanced playing field for all the players. That was the genesis of the rules put in place during the last depression (1930's). It worked until Ronald Reagan started to dismantle the rules. That shift takes away the rights and protections 99% of us had to keep the predators off our backs.

In the current environment we need to continue to regulate, MORE THAN EVER. We need to call the predators out and start to prosecute them for stealing the assets of the country... it was the large corporations that stole from us, not the government. Many of those corporations have been convicted of past FELONIES but, unlike people, continue to do business without penalty. The money behind the deregulation we have seen has built to the point that mirrors what America looked like in a similarly deregulated environment of the 1920's. It was after the prior crash that rules were put in place that protected us for almost 50 years.

One of the symptomatic changes that was hustled through about ten years ago was the insertion in the bankruptcy codes that a person's home was no longer protected. In other words, your home was now eligible to be taken away from you. Previously it was protected as an asset from the banks... witness what happened after the banks were further deregulated to create not just sub-prime mortgages but sell those debts in bulk as derivatives... massive displacement of former homeowners who were forced by the collapse that caused to declare bankruptcy.